Longform

Baroness' third studio album, Yellow & Green, out July 17 on Relapse, is their grandest collection to date, and also their most stripped-down and spare. (To these ears, it's also their best.) The 75-minute double LP finds the band with a new bassist, new homebase, and a new approach to singing and songwriting. After a shorter in-person discussion with the entire group, I spoke at length on the phone with vocalist/guitarist/house artist John Baizley about the state of the band, among other things, as we approach Yellow & Green's release date.

Pitchfork: Since the last record, you guys got a new bassist, developed a new sound, and you and your family moved to Philadelphia. Is Baroness 2012 a different band from the one you formed in Savannah close to 10 years ago?

John Baizley: I feel like we're doing the same exact thing we've always done, just doing doing it in a new place, [with] some new faces. We were based out of Savannah for eight years and during that time we had three different guitar players. We move around a lot, we're pretty flexible. At this point now, [drummer] Allen [Blickle] and I are the two guys that have been in the band the longest, and we've seen things change constantly, but the one thing is that we've always tried to keep whatever the core thing for the band is intact so that we don't change, that we don't feel like we've had to become different people who have had to compromise our original intent as a result of any number of factors. Long story short, it feels the same. I'm sure the outside perspective will differ because it is certainly true that this record's taking a different step than anticipated, but that's also kind of our thing. Or, at least, what we'd like to consider our thing. So maybe this is the most accessible step that we've taken, but we intend on doing it with the next record and the record after that.

"The Baroness-circa-2012 definition of heavy [is] not a tuning and it's not necessarily a volume; it's more of a feeling or an idea or some goal post that we're headed towards."

Pitchfork: You played bass on the new record, right?

JB: Yeah, I did play bass on the new record.

Pitchfork: I ask because I imagine that when people hear the record, they'll wonder why it sounds different-- you know, "maybe it's the new bass player," maybe this or that. What do you think contributed to the new sound?

JB: I'm gonna try to keep this answer as brief as possible. We've been playing music together longer than this band. [Ex-bassist/backing vocalist] Summer [Welch] and Allen and I and [guitarist/backing vocalist] Pete [Adams] have been playing music with one another for 15 or 20 years at this point. It's always been part of my plan to just take our music to its logical conclusion, whatever that is. The idea and the motive of the band is to exhibit progression when possible and to offer challenges both internally and externally. We're bound to see things change. It stands to reason that as we've become more well-seasoned as musicians, well-travelled, more experienced, just generally older; we've learned how to flex those creative muscles and the artistic side of us. We've learned how to use the tools that we've got in a more comprehensive way.

I think Blue Record was a big springboard for Yellow & Green. Its writing and touring and recording was very instrumental in creating this record: at the end of two-and-a-half years with that music, it felt like the walls were gonna close in if we didn't almost re-imagine and breakdown what we were at the time. We saw that as having a lot to do with, just musically speaking, spatial elements. We just wanted more breathing room. More breathing room and a new starting point, or a new central locus from which we write, whereby any direction seemed possible to us. This was articulated to me from everybody individually, as a group, when we were just on the verge of writing a new record. Given the band dynamic, which tends to be more familial than professional, always, I took what I felt was everybody was saying in terms of direction and just let it happen, just let the story unfold. It was great because it was almost like a creative dam bursting for me and I almost couldn't stop writing song after song after song after song.

I realize that there's a change in the music. It doesn't have anything to do with necessarily who's playing, it doesn't have anything to do with very direct like "we need to do this, that, or the other." It's just that we recognize that we needed change and we just had to open our minds up and be receptive to that change when it happened and just let it unfold naturally. That's really what happened. We were off tour for a year, we haven't done that in a while, so we had the time and space and the energy to break down what we felt fearful was becoming a pattern. Some of the stuff that had become too regular for us and too regimented, we sort of cast that aside and started this record maybe in the same way that we started the band nine years ago.

I think that's pretty critical. We did that once, before we put out our first record, we just took what we were doing and said, "Just because we did X, Y, and Z doesn't mean we have to repeat those things ad nauseum." In fact, it was our choice to break it down, focus on the spots that aren't happening, the weak spots, and try our new strengths and then move forward, see what happens, put ourselves out there, take risks. That's kind of typical band-talk stuff. I just feel that for the first time we were able to make a legitimately as big a step as we wanted to without tripping up too much and having to recoil.

Pitchfork: One thing Peter said during the interview at Terminal 5 is that there's still heaviness to the album, there's still loudness and heavy moments. And something you had said, if I remember correctly, was that the subject matter, to you, was particularly heavy.

JB: Yeah, it was. Again, this is one of those things that, this may make me seem like a bit weathered or something, but after close to 2,000 live performances, what I define as heavy has changed. How could it not? I'd be disappointed if it hadn't. Like so many people who exist in the loud, heavy rock circuit, whatever splinter subgenre you wanna call it, at a certain point, you realize that there are certain tools and tricks to the trade to help bolster the "heavy" ideal. But what happens is you get tired of those tricks-- maybe it's volume, maybe it's tuning, maybe it's something really blunt-- but as we've gotten older we've become more interested in subtle. Heavy, for me in 2003, was 10 amplifiers on stage, a ton of volume, and notes on my guitar that were more appropriate for bass guitar.

But those were tricks. That was artifice to mask youthful songwriting, and now that songs have become more important to us, we're trying to find the more nuanced, more appropriate for us idea of heavy. And it came out conceptually and lyrically from the standpoint of subject matter, most of which has to do with the heavier moments of my life and our lives, not necessarily the sunny days and happy moments, but the things we need to struggle with. That's what this band is-- it's an outlet for us and a crutch, or a shoulder for us sometimes with the stuff that we have to deal with. Maybe sometimes it's more in a reflective way and maybe sometimes it's in a more emotional, cathartic way. We use this music to help us get through the bullshit that drags us down.

That's the Baroness-circa-2012 definition of heavy. It's not a tuning and it's not necessarily a volume; it's more of a feeling or an idea or some goal post that we're headed towards. That can easily change into something else within the next year or two. This record is essentially a snapshot of 2011 where we were, who we were, what we were doing, what we were dealing with on the day-to-day. I think, in those terms, it's awesome, because it's allowed me to move past some things, and through the arts and the creative process, I've come to terms with some of that stuff.

Pitchfork: There are recurring themes on the album, a number of water-related themes and anchors and bones. Are some of these songs connected? Or are they connected in as much about your life in that way?

JB: Yeah, I think they're connected in that way. One thing thing I should be very, very clear about is that this is not a concept record. In fact, even the double-record nature of it is sort of by default only because it was the best way to present our record. There was no preconceived, overarching concept, no intended narrative, any of that stuff that happens is a cumulative thing that is just the result of the time period. You're definitely one of the few people who have pointed out some of the reoccurring themes, none of which was I really paying too much attention to as it was going on. I was not-- I mean maybe sort of willfully ignorant when it came to looking at the lyrics. I just wasn't paying attention to whether or not they seemed to be about the same subject or something different, they were about things that were happening at the time that I wrote them.

Basically, writing this thing was kind of a roller coaster because it never slowed down and the internal perspective was really weird and chaotic and disjointed sometimes because it was such an outpouring of music. There are 18 tracks on the record and I believe we started over 30 of them. We had to cut quite a few songs because they weren't working, or this thing or the other thing, and not enough time or energy to sit there and consider what they were about. If they felt genuine, if the other guys responded to it, I responded to it, the mood in the rehearsal space was good, we went with that, we took that for what it was worth because of the fact that we weren't on tour at all in 2011 we really wrote this record in a bubble.

In a lot of our past records, we'd take a couple of songs out on tour and fool around with them, see what the audience thinks of the brand new stuff. That's always informed us in some way. But with this there was no audience input, there was no familial or friend input on it; we just wrote and wrote and wrote and went through all the anxieties, successes, triumphs, failures, as the four of us, and sometimes the three of us.

Pitchfork: As far as thematics go, though, there's a "Yellow Theme" and a "Green Theme." And the Yellow album is more anthemic, the Green mellower.

JB: I proposed the idea very early in the process that we would do a double record for a litany of reasons. Once we decided on it, it seemed like a really ambitious thing to us, and it was. In hindsight, there was a lot of work in the planning and organization of it. The initial thought was, "Why don't we do one that'll be the obvious, heavy rock record we know we're gonna write and one that's more mellow and just have a really stark difference between one and the other?" As soon as we started putting that concept into function, I think we all realized it was a really preposterous, heavy-handed idea. It was obvious, conceptually too simple, and not poignant enough for us. Then, we started considering a little cross-pollination and rather than having the starkness there, one record that's black and one record that's white, we went more into the shades of gray. Yellow being the first record, it got a bit more of the firing-on-all-cylinders songs and on Green it gets a little bit headier, a little bit more reflective. A certain amount of that is intentional.

The trick in sequencing with this record was to sequence both CDs so that they felt pretty complete by themselves-- and that's what you get, a beginning, a middle, and an end. The musical arc that you expect from one of our records is there for both-- each has a similar length and a similar track numbering. But then, to try to step back and see the big picture with both discs together and you could actually listen to the whole thing and it would still have that same sort of feeling. That was kind of tough to do. But we had the songs to guide us and there's such a variety on there that we could define what each song was about and where it seemed to fit on the record. I think it was successful in some ways when looked at like that.

Pitchfork: The cover art fits in with this idea of finding heaviness in different corners. It's a pretty calm image. It's sort of peaceful. But then there's that knife in her hand.

JB: In some ways I was responding to the music and some of the themes that had become interesting to me. It's sort of the sense that a lot of what I tackled lyrically or conceptually with the record is present on first glance but has-- at least to me-- this implication of horror, or "this is the moment before a car crash," or the moment after a car crash. This goes back to the discussion of subtleties and nuances. It seemed a little bit more engaging and interesting to me to consider those moments before, those moments after, rather than the ease and bluntness that comes with graphic violence or obvious, terrifying things.

I wanted to do this big piece of artwork that did the same thing that CDs do. It's one piece, ultimately, but you can break it into halves, you can have it stand up on its own as a record cover. It features lots of characters, these sort of archetypal women that are reoccurring themes across the course of our cover artwork. I was trying to come up with a way where they can all be interacting with one another and putting the same sort of ideas, the same sort of hyper-loaded imagery and icons and silly metaphors and all that sort of stuff and combining it all into this one record cover. I want it to feel, to have that moment before with an implication of something very bad about to happen.

Pitchfork: Doing a double album, especially now when people listen to music in a very piecemeal way, feels like an old-school gesture.

JB: Yeah, most people who know me will tell you that it's not hard to sell me on an outdated idea or an idea that's not necessarily in vogue, or an idea that's a little riskier. I just don't think about it like that. I came up in a day and age where you listen to music one way, and that was through the medium of an album, or a 7", or an EP. The stuff that impressed me was always the full-lengths, the album as a form of art. We've never tried to deviate from that because we've never really known any other way, and this record's no different.

I could wax on all day about it-- we're trying to be a turd in the punchbowl of the mp3, single-driven universe... Maybe in some ways that's true, but more bluntly, when I hear a piece of music, I hear something that's an album, that's a full-length's worth of music. I don't think that if each of our records has a mission statement, I don't think that we can express that statement in three and a half minutes. It takes a while for us to unfold the story. We speak in long form and I hope that remains the case. I think it's more interesting. I think it offers you a different set of rules to play by. We're going to until it's absolutely impossible for us...we're going to continue to do things the way it makes sense for our music, the way our music depicts it. In some ways, I hope we never become a band that has one solid-ass single and a bunch of filler. That would be painful for me. But, that's the way it works. I'll be a stick in the mud about that, but I realize there's a much easier route to take and that's spend all your time writing literally just three minutes and 30 seconds of music then bullshit for the rest of the record and hope that one thing takes off. You know, but fuck that.

"This is not for the conservative Morbid Angel fan."

Pitchfork: Speaking of perception of music, how has the reaction been so far to the songs that have been out there?

JB: I'm a little disappointed because I thought I would've gotten more flak at this point, but it doesn't seem like that's the case, at least to my ears. Of course, I get a distinctly different response than somebody who's not in the band would get, but of the press that I've done so far, it's been good. Some of the stuff I've seen online has been good. The new songs that we're playing on tour were going over well-- really well-- in front of an audience. It was like they're designed not to like them.

I feel good, but I should say that we're not the sort of band that considers or makes assumptions about what our audience anticipates from us or expects from us. That would restrict the way that we write pretty significantly. This record may actually fly in the face of that manner of thinking, in some ways. I think this is gonna really polarize some parts of our fan base. It's definitely gonna polarize people on the fringe, who maybe don't buy our line of bullshit that well to begin with. This is not for the conservative Morbid Angel fan. I think that one of the keys for Baroness writing and performing is that we feel it. We put ourselves into what we do. With this record, we've never been as fully immersed in a record as we have with this and we have never been as fully supportive as we have with this. It's unified us in a really cool way and it's brought everybody's energy levels up.

After almost a decade on tour, you have to figure out what it is that inspires you. It's not the same thing that was interesting to you when you were 22. That would be ridiculous. I think we've been good, we've been good with each other, we're always straightforward, we're always honest. We need everybody involved, we need everybody personally ready to fuckin' do it. Internally, this record represents us having the band together and strengthen our bonds, even though we lost a member through the process, it's really strengthened us in other ways, which has been awesome.

Pitchfork: I remember reading, I think in the Decibel feature, that Allen said this is the first Baroness record he finds himself listening to at home.

JB: Yeah, he needed to get way more involved in this record to write it, and we needed him more involved. When we did the last record, we were so spaced out, I was in Savannah, he was in New York, so to rehearse we had to get a plane ticket, and that's not cheap. No one wants to do that. So, we'd write when we were getting ready for tours or we'd write... no, that's the only time we'd do it. It was tough. It was really tough, it ended up being me and Pete and Summer writing our last record all the time and we didn't have a drummer, so we sort of wrote the rhythms into the guitar bits and it became this sort of guitar overload. I think Allen felt really boxed in by the kind of stuff and, as I said, I'm pretty aware of this stuff, we talked pretty openly about it, so when it came time to start this, it seemed critical to me that we involved everybody on a more equal level as we're getting the songs together. Week after week, you could feel everybody getting into it in a different way and songs became a little bit more precious, a little bit more personal, and that was absolutely necessary.

Baroness: Eula

Pitchfork: Was there an attempt focus more on the rhythm section?

JB: Well, yes and no. We tried to de-emphasize the guitar-yness of it. I think you can push that so far before you're in caricature country. Pete and I have tried every trick in the guitar rulebook and it became boring and overwrought to us, so what I suggested before we write it is we try to put ego out of the writing as much as possible and recognize from day one that no one instrument is more important in that way than the other instrument.

Nobody needs to be fully audible all the time, that's not the way music is intended to be listened to. We started to orchestrate it so everything was complementary, just from the compositional standpoint, we started to control when you would hear instruments, you hear the guitars when you're meant to hear the guitars, you hear the drums when you're meant to hear the drums. Very often times, when we're tracking the record, I would say something like, "Let's try not to make that guitar sound too much like a guitar right here."

That's sort of the obvious way to go at it. Sometimes we would consider the guitars more as like a string section, we may have lost a bit more, same thing with the drums or bass. It's just that the goal was, and the constant phrase was, "What fits the song?" Not the part, what helps drive the point of this song home the best? If it's direct and blunt, it'll be direct and blunt, if it's spacey or orchestral, then so be it. We became interested in the songs themselves as very pure things. We hadn't done that in the past two, our old style of songwriting that we had tended to be a bit more "kitchen sink", everything's in it and let the pieces fall where they will and hopefully something starts to come out of it. With this, it became more like short story writing. You can't do anything that doesn't support the idea of the song, anything else would be filler or extraneous, so we would cut that.

Pitchfork: So you've been writing based on the song, as opposed to coming up with riffs and writing based on a riff?

JB: Yeah, and I think everybody will notice it's a much less riff-oriented record, which presents whole new set of challenges for us. That was the thing, the songs are the most important thing, not the solos, not the ear candy. Nothing is more important than the song itself, even at the risk of boldly losing the sound of any one instrument.

"We had to deal with the fact that I'm not like fucking Freddie Mercury."

Pitchfork: Was it a challenge for you to sing on a record with mostly clean vocals?

B: Yes and no. This is kind of a vague answer. The tougher thing would have been to continue performing vocally as we had in the past. That had become difficult and damaging and was a real restriction for us physically and sonically. I felt that we needed to focus on the way and the fluidity in which we expressed ourselves and that vocal sound that have sort of been locked into was expressive only to a certain point and beyond that there wasn't anything you could do. Furthermore, every tour was basically without a voice, so consistency was lost, expression was lost.

At first, I just had to become comfortable with a cleaner voice, I had to find a way to not feel too exposed and to feel comfortable presenting music like that. We had to deal with the fact that I'm not like fucking Freddie Mercury or anything like that, we're working with limitations, as we always are. It's just about defining those and pushing just beyond them. But in the long run, it was easier, it was way easier, because now vocally I can perform a 75-minute record without that same sort wear and tear that would happen with our last record. I've gained a greater comprehension on my voice as a tool or as an instrument, I just know how to use it better now. I had to learn that very quickly because the first lesson that became was obvious and apparent to me was what I was doing with my voice is exactly what you're not supposed to do. I was literally destroying it.

Pitchfork: You just said hardcore Morbid Angel fans wouldn't necessarily appreciate what you guys are doing here, but as far as the lineup at the Terminal 5 show-- Decapitated, then you guys, then Meshuggah... Before you started playing, and I pictured you playing the new songs, I thought it could possibly get pretty interesting. [laughs] How did that lineup get together, and did that cross your mind at all?

B: The reason we took that tour was because Meshuggah asked us. It wasn't a bunch of agents talking about who's worth tickets or what's the best way to maximize profits on the tour, 'cause we wouldn't have been asked if that was the case [laughs]. Those guys were interested in our band and I will give them huge props for putting that billing together, because it seems crazy. We took it because it was crazy.

I'm a huge Meshuggah fan, so it was an awesome opportunity to go out and play with them, but I could just as easily have seen them once or twice. The cool thing to me was putting ourselves on a tour that wasn't going to be easy, that wasn't going to be a sure thing. Furthermore, it was the first time that Matt [Maggioni] had ever performed with us on bass, so it seemed like a good idea to me to start it off somewhere that wasn't necessarily gonna be comfortable, we weren't gonna have yes men surrounding us and confidence boosters in the front row all the time. We weathered a few audience insults and dodgy moments and sometimes you need that. It's a humbling thing.

We might think that we're the King Shit of Fuck Mountain with the music we write, but we got out there pretty easily. You got a 2,500 person bullshit detector sitting right in front of you and they don't like what you're putting down, and you know it. Then the fun starts because that's a challenge. After playing so long and being able to deal with so many adverse situations, when you're put in a hostile environment like that, your job becomes controlling it through the honesty or candor of your music. That's all we had to do. Visibly, we didn't really fit in on that stage, sonically, I don't think we were a comfortable fit, but I like to look through my rose-tinted glasses-- music can win people over, it's a pretty powerful equalizer on that tour and tours like that. It's fun to see if we can win people over just by feeling it, just by meaning it.

Baroness: "March to the Sea"

Agalloch have followed their fourth and most successful album, 2010's Marrow of the Spirit, with the Goethe-inspired Faustian Echoes, a Billy Anderson-produced EP that includes one 20-minute song divided into two parts. The longtime Portland, Ore., dark metal band, which features San Francisco drummer Aesop Dekker (Ludicra, Worm Ouroboros) in its current incarnation, are heading out on a summer tour next week. The EP's streaming at Bandcamp and will be available in physical form on the group's Dämmerung Arts label at stops between July 11 and August 11, before seeing wider distribution after the tour. I spoke with co-founding vocalist/guitarist John Haughm and longtime (since 1996) guitarist Don Anderson about the EP, the tour, and the state of extreme metal in the United States.

Pitchfork: Faustian Echoes is connected to Goethe's Faust. How closely aligned is his text to the EP? What's the narrative here? And did you add your own story elements to it?

John Haughm: The "lyrics" are taken directly from an English translation of Goethe's Faust. We used select phrases and film samples to create the narrative which, together, outlines the backbone of the original story.

Pitchfork: It's a single, two-part song. What inspired that form? It's the longest song you've written. It beats out "Black Lake Nidstång".

Don Anderson: I think all bands have their own innate sense of time when it comes to writing. An average length song for Agalloch is around 10 minutes. I think long songs allow more room for the listener to reflect on what they're hearing. The mind has more space to wander in a long song-- with different passages-- than in a song that has a very strict verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, where it's easy to predict what comes next and so you are always anticipating, rather than reflecting, on what the song is really doing. We tend to think about arrangements on a greater scale. A song like "Not Unlike the Waves", for example, has traditional verses/choruses, but is nonetheless nearly 10 minutes. I've always loved long songs and if I found a band that had a song that was even seven minutes in length, that was as much of a reason to buy their album as the cool artwork.

Pitchfork: The Faust legend, and Goethe's version, is something that's been used a number of times in music-- from operas, to classical scores, to Eminem and Tenacious D. How did you go about bringing something unique to it? Did you think about this larger history when writing "Faustian Echoes"?

JH: It's interesting how we ended up using this subject matter to begin with. It basically forced its way into the track. Initially, I had a six-minute piece of soundscape material that Steven (Wray Lobdell of the band Faust) had made for us during the Marrowof the Spirit sessions. I thought we would eventually release it as a B-side or something, and I decided to call it "Faustian Echoes" as a direct reference to the Faust that Steve was a member of. I think it works incredibly well with the film samples. Then last year on our way back from Israel, we were sitting in the Goethe Bar, inside the Frankfurt airport, discussing the idea of recording an EP. There was never an original intention to make a conceptual EP; it simply became one through a series of coincidences. Once I realized this and decided to pursue the Faust story; the song, the artwork...everything fell into place. We wrote the entire song in a month and recorded it in a weekend. Everything happened very quickly, as if almost by force of fate.

Pitchfork: How'd you decide to release the EP on your label, Dämmerung Arts?

DA: I think it's wise for all bands that can afford it to secure their independence and freedom as much as possible. It's taken us nearly 16 years to do this, but it has been one of the best decisions we've ever made. Agalloch has always been very focused on every aspect of a release and with Faustian Echoes we now have full control.

Pitchfork: It's been two years since Marrow of the Spirit. Do you have another full-length in the works?

DA: We have sketches, riffs, and plenty of ideas.

JH: This EP was a nice study of how we should approach the writing and recording of the next full-length. It provided an excellent opportunity to try out a new studio, a new engineer, a completely new writing approach, and I think the result speaks for itself.

Pitchfork: Marrow was your highest profile album to date in the sense of some crossover and "mainstream" attention. What was that like? It's interesting to me that you'd follow that moment up with a 21-minute song.

DA: Mainstream attention is perfectly fine as long as the music, image, ideas, and artistic integrity are never compromised. You can say whatever you want about the production of Marrow, but we did what we wanted with the music and recording. It doesn't sound like a modern metal album with triggered drums, vocal correction, and all those things that I feel are sadly compromising music today. This is an approach we plan to continue with for the next full length. There wasn't really any attention paid to what it would mean to follow up Marrow with a single 21-minute song. The decision was almost as easy as: let's do an EP with just one long song recorded live in the studio.

Pitchfork: You guys have been around for more than 15 years. What are your thoughts on the "post-black metal" tag? Extreme music is clearly in a very different place now than it was in 1995.

DA: Much like the changes that death metal underwent when the second wave of black metal was just getting started (I'm thinking of bands like Atheist, Death, and Cynic and later Gorguts), I suppose it would only be natural that black metal would grow and develop over time as well. I think "post-black metal"-- which really only implies that "something had changed after the Norwegian sound reached its potential"-- started with Ved Buens Ende, but really seemed to cohere with Arcturus' La Masquerade Infernale. That was the first record where I said, ok, black metal is starting to incorporate other influences. Now we have really incredible bands that are doing interesting things like Deathspell Omega, Blut Aus Nord, and the later Abigor albums. I don't see Agalloch as being similar to those bands, but I do like to think we share a desire to stretch and contribute to what was the initial "Norwegian sound" of the early 90s. Whether you put a prefix in front of black metal or not, obviously it needed to grow if it were going to last this long.

DA: Yes. German literature aside for now, the references to American literature and our use of images of local scenery were very deliberate even early on in our history. In reference to the previous question, we all felt another way to differentiate ourselves from the black metal of the early 90s was to not gaze longingly at the "old world." American black metal bands in the mid-90s were quoting Nietzsche and using obscure imagery that all seemed very European. Having grown up in the Northwest and on the Columbia River Gorge, I saw nothing that couldn't easily compete with the images of Norwegian landscapes on so many black metal albums. So, we wanted to be American and although our sound is clearly influenced by European bands, we felt it disingenuous to not at least be American when it came to imagery and ideas. Even "marrow of the spirit" is a slightly altered phrase from Thoreau's Walden. Although an obvious choice, when I wanted to offer a meaningful quote regarding our American tour, it only felt right to cite a favorite passage from On the Road.

Pitchfork: Can you talk a bit about that tour? You're playing longer sets. And you hand-picked local acts. It's not the typical summer trek.

DA: We try to do everything on our own terms. We want each show to be special and this means having local or supporting acts that share some connection with what we're doing and that we can stand by and agree our doing interesting things musically. I always hated seeing a band where the promoter had arbitrarily tacked on four death metal bands that seemed grossly out of place. I think our fans appreciate this. I realize this can be interpreted as not supporting locals scenes-- but our shows our not about local scenes, they are for the fans. And we take as much care in a show as we do our songwriting and packaging.

JH: It is sometimes difficult to maintain this, especially in markets where we have not played before and the promoters don't want to risk not having some local support. We've had to compromise from time to time...

* with Eight Bells^ with Musk Ox# with Pallbearer% with Maleveller& with Author & Punisher! with Oskoreien

The black punk/black metal group Raspberry Bulbs, which started as the solo project of Bone Awl's He Who Crushes Teeth, is now a more-than-promising proper quintet featuring members of Bone Awl's live lineup, Rorschach, etc. Deformed Worship, their proper LP follow-up to 2011's Nature Tries Again is out in the coming months on Personnel. Here are a couple songs from it, "Wild Inside" and "Groping the Angel's Face". (Keep up to date at He Who Crushes' label Seedstock.)